It isn’t as easy for me to like Matthew Fox as you might think, despite the obvious similarities (appearance, Episcopalians with a loose sense of denomination). There are differences too—I’m less of an iconoclast; I was raised Baptist (Baptists Methodists and Bible churches, oh my!), and blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, BLAH blah. My fascinating life, ladies and germs.

But things can happen to you which remind you why Matthew is Matthew. America at mid-century was a narrow place: materialist, conformist, and just not much room for people outside of the ‘have money, the right answers, and don’t ask questions or be weird’—just a very narrow place. That was my parents’ world, and to a lesser extent it still exists, despite having changed, and being told that it was a capital crime to reject it seems to have mostly produced either people who slavishly obey or recklessly disobey, and not many who think, or emote healthily. [And then there are the people in charge of the world—Why, I’m so reasonable, you little sick boy, that I’m prepared to say with all the authority of my money that if you won’t obey me, you really must be ill! You back down now; you weren’t raised to be a nigger. I’ll go back to being polite when I’m comfortable, dammit.] [The white guys who run the world Really do not like being compared unfavorably with God, which is why Matthew became Matthew.]

And seeing that Matthew certainly isn’t neurotically obedient, and still isn’t (let’s be honest, for a change), a dispenser of drugs or television, maybe he’s got a few steps off in the right direction….

You’ll forgive me if I’m a little unorthodox, even if this is an assertion in favor of classical (midcentury?) calmness, but sometimes it’s good, just that you can tell your story without making it seem like every. single. day was a Jezebel vs Elijah Epic Showdown To The Death…. Jesus, after all, had a showdown to the death, in a way, but even then, he never acted like somebody from a B movie made for television.

…. We’re still quite dissimilar. I know what it’s like to be angry, but I’m not sure I’m as reactive in that direction, assimilating it to my habitual thought. As an adult child I’m fearful of authority and the angry, and sometimes I resent feeling like that, but there are broad swaths of non-anger in my brain, too. Matthew is not angry enough to be stupid, but his thought is very reactive.

I don’t know. Napoleon and Bismarck were contemptible people, and to the world they were Christians, but sometimes the man who has to get up out of bed in the morning sends his own little Ems telegram to the elite, you know. Although I do not cover things up for Richard Nixon, I think I am more of an (Episcopalian) Richard Rohr than a Matthew here. It’s still very much either/or for him.

…. But, in spite of all that, I am also a post-denominational believer, so I suppose it bears remembering that we are at least superficially alike, even if we are not always alike at the emotive/heart level.

…. Also, although I know I am a critic and not an original writer—like a sort of plebeian Donald McKinnon—I think there is a lack of balance between heady bibliographic writing, (much of this), and more personal trauma and healing writings; I guess I am Oedipal but I like Sunday Searching Rachel better.

…. Cartoon Mathew: Blah blah blah Death to Philosophers! *swig* I’ll be at the bar encouraging people to assassinate philosophers.
“They probably don’t care about philosophy, Matt.”
Cartoon Matthew: Well, I’ve gotta explain; I’ll explain—First we gotta find out where these people are, and then we’ll knock ‘em dead.

I mean, the liturgy he wrote sounds nice, and the tea-and-scones protesters a little childish. [Rioting so that Other People will be polite: What do we want? Tea! What goes good with tea? Scones!) But all this, you know, Whip yourself into a fury reading Kant! It’s like, you have to go looking for people who prefer Immanuel to drinking, Matt; what exactly are you trying to prove?

…. Matt’s an older man, a different generation, so maybe I just don’t appreciate what he’s been through etc, but I just think he’s one of these people who in a way is full of shit because he just can’t imagine anyone listening or being given a fair hearing so he just screams and screams and screams, you know. He reminds me of one of the Black feminists who writes these books like, God Damn White Feminism: Because There Can Be No Peace While There Are Still White People, instead of—obviously I would do if I were tempted exactly what I want to do now lol—My Challenge To White Feminism: Because It’s Not As Though Everything’s Fine, you know.

So there’s that.

…. Poor Matthew doesn’t like me. ^^ The poor sinning radical will just have to struggle through life without being nourished by those naughty liberals. Lol.

…. Though of course I don’t know what it’s like to be raised Catholic, so.

…. “A community gets much more done and at a far cheaper price than bureaucratic capitalism or bureaucratic communism or the modern state.”
Matthew F

…. It’s nice that in the mass he designed artists had some freedom, that they weren’t treated suspiciously, like in my father’s church when I was growing up, although I have had good experiences with classic liturgy in the Episcopal church.

…. “If only we could be like the Giant Ant; something he said inspires me to this day. ‘It’s good to rape little girls; it gives me an erection.’” If only Matt could stop being so dualist and seeing everything as bad prudes and good sexy times, you know. Bad authority/good rebels. Big bad meanies/cosmic goodie goodies. It’s kinda, dumb. Like, you could explain that in thirty pages, it’s so simplistic. Are you in charge? Then you’re Bad. Time for sexy time justice, time for Truth! *cartoon Superman flying*.

…. It’s not like I really think that Matt does more harm than good, you know. He does some good. He’s just, you know. He’s a contender.

…. “It’s hard to believe that eighteen years have passed….”

You mean it could have been over? I could’ve been done with you, Matthew! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, wow.

…. It would indeed be nice if community ritual were as normal as the movies or theatre; a lot of people just want the crazy stuff, you know, the crazy-making-ness…. He is too hard on the old school, though. “You’re just a bunch of passé old people, so I ought to have more money/real estate than you.”

But it would be nice if the Jack and Jill crowd could get together and practice, even with people they disagreed with, instead of just buying jewelry (better than yours) or zonking out (numbing the pain that they can’t afford nice jewelry, lol).

…. I don’t know, I was meditating and I thought, Matthew must really be living the dream, like one of Plutarch’s Lives guys, only fighting with the books, writing and writing and fighting with the books, you know.

And then I got up and started to read him and I wasn’t sure lol. “Catholic fascism is here! The end is near, I fear, people only want beer, and I can’t blame them, my dear.”

I guess he’s grieving, you know. The church often just wants status, so it can’t change, and the world wants status, so it doesn’t want the church anymore…. I don’t know. Matthew doesn’t really mean all the things he writes, he’s just very emotional, not an uptight holy roller, that Matt.

…. Although the thing about Matt is, he could make ten bold statements I could disagree with nine and a half of them, but even without bold statements, the social fact if you like is that I don’t emote like my parents’ generation, and I’m not a teenager anymore; we’re just different. I’m a Muggle girl in a Hogawarts world, you know…. And the world before was just…. I don’t know, Jesus died on the Cross as a warning to you lot, you know; ah my God…. And I’m not saying I want to be Pentecostal and get sold a bill of goods (act out! obey authority! use your hips!); it’s just another way of being told to shut up, you know.

Sometimes people just don’t get to have their own say, in this world, you know. The really sad thing though, is that they start looking for something else, instead of what’s been taken from them, you know.

….
—…. But existence goes on. Nothing can stop it.
—That’s great Matt. You hit just the right note. What a way to end it.
—End it? No, I have another page and a half about how Ratzinger is the devil.
—Matthew! What the hell! (turns) You’re not still recording this.
—We’re recording and we’re live.

…. …. Special concluding note: But I guess, I get it. I try not to be as classically ‘negative’ as Matt is; I prefer to try to let go as opposed to fight against. But I sorta get it now, where he was coming from. Wanting to support fellow Christians out of tolerance can devolve into staying silent or giving inappropriate support out of party feeling. (The church isn’t supposed to be a club for the benefit of its members.) I don’t have to go out of my way to support and promote dialogue with many many angry party people, members of the Christian Party, because it might only further alienate people who might in other circumstances feel free to become Jesus’s disciples, if those others didn’t insult them, and drive them away. One tries to be inclusive, even of trouble-makers, of course; inclusion is little without that. But if a certain party is going to restrict itself to a narrow expression of the range of human and created expressions, and limit itself in its manifestations and its ‘orthodoxies’, perhaps a few examples of this sort of thought will suffice, and not many, for my own purposes.

An excellent memoir. ( )